The objective of the proposed research is to account for cross-national, longitudinal variation in government expenditures and programs for the aged. Theories of modernization and aging have ignored the mediating effect of government programs in determining the status of the aged while theories of growth of the welfare state have not focused specifically on the component of social welfare designed for the aged. The result has been that government support of the aged has not been studied empirically at the cross-national level, and that many theoretical and policy-related questions about the status of the aged and the structure of public pension programs remain unanswered. We propose to develop appropriate theory, gather the necessary data, and analyze the determinants of government support of the aged in order to answer these questions. To reach this objective, we specify from industrial convergence and class structure theories of the welfare state a model which takes government support of the aged as a function of a nation's economic development, demographic and family structure, class structure and relations, dependency relations with other nations, and characteristics of the state. The model also specifies associations among government support for the aged, support for other social welfare programs, funding balance of the social insurance system, and mean income of the aged. To test the relationships specified in the model, we propose to finish gathering aggregate data for a sample of 60 developed and developing nations covering the years 1965, 1970, and 1975; a sample of 20 developed nations covering every fifth year from 1950-1975; and a sample of five nations covering single years from 1950-1975. The estimation techniques used to test the model will include traditional factor analytic and multiple regression techniques, but will also involve the use of generalized least-squares and LISREL in order to deal with problems of autocorrelation and measurement error.